The Paris Review's Blog, page 48

Lifelines: On Santa Barbara

Diana Markosian, The Arrival, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

What follows is a series of rooms containing staged photographs, archival family images, and a few stray objects: a cherry-red rotary phone, a scalloped glass ashtray. (A photograph depicting these items, along with a small radio, is titled The Lifeline.) But the show’s centerpiece—the vehicle through which we watch the narrative unfold—is a short film dramatizing the journey Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, took from Moscow to America. Actors play the central roles. In one scene, Svetlana (played by Ana Imnadze) tries to buy bread at a crowded market; in another she has a violent argument with her estranged husband, Arsen. According to Jonathan Griffin’s 2020 profile of Markosian in the New York Times, her parents came to Moscow from Armenia to finish their Ph.D.’s and separated before Markosian was born. Arsen was an engineer, Svetlana an economist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arsen resorted to selling counterfeit Barbie dolls on the black market in order to survive.

Diana Markosian, Lifeline from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

Interspersed with these scenes from daily life are clips of Svetlana in a darkened room watching a daytime drama called Santa Barbara. The show aired in Moscow from 1992 to 1999 and starred Robin Wright, A Martinez, and Dane Witherspoon, among others. It was the first American television series to air on Russian television. Millions of Russians tuned in, caught up in the fantasy world of the forever-feuding Capwell and Lockridge families. The private yachts and palm-lined streets, elegant dinner parties in mansions overlooking the Pacific—here, then, was the American Dream.

Svetlana gets caught up in that dream. She registers, in secret, as a mail-order bride and becomes engaged to a man named Eli, who lives—where else?—in Santa Barbara. In the middle of the night, Svetlana wakes her children Diana and David, ages seven and nine, and tells them to pack. They leave the next morning without saying goodbye to their father, who has remained present in their lives despite the separation. The children will lose touch with him for the next fifteen years. 

Eli, played by actor Gene Jones, is waiting for the family at the airport in California. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he turns out to be a very old man, nothing like the photograph of the middle-aged man he’d sent. “When you came and saw him, what did you think?” the actress playing Svetlana asks the real Svetlana, who is middle aged now. The two women sit across from one another at a small dining table: the younger “Svetlana” in costume, the real Svetlana wearing a sleek black dress and pumps. 

“That was actually a little shocking,” the real Svetlana says. “I was definitely expecting different than I saw.”

Eli is a kind man. He and Svetlana make a noble attempt to love each other. One moving scene depicts the two of them in bed with a book open between them, Eli helping Svetlana practice English.

“I have confidence,” Eli says, enunciating the words.

“I have confidence,” Svetlana repeats.

“I am confident,” Eli says. 

“I am confident,” she repeats.

“But I was unhappy for a long time,” Svetlana says to her daughter in a recorded telephone interview, clips of which play in voice-over throughout the film. 

“Do you think he felt it?” Markosian asks.

“Of course he did,” Svetlana says.

Diana Markosian, The Pink Robe, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

***

Markosian’s film, scored by the composer Nils Frahm, is twelve minutes long. I watched it five times. Markosian collaborated with Lynda Myles, one of the scriptwriters on the original Santa Barbara, to write her own screenplay. I expected the film to feel like an episode of the soap opera. But it resists melodrama and heightened emotionalism. Eli is portrayed neither as villain—preying on a younger woman with no means—nor as victim of a femme fatale. Svetlana, too, refuses the victim role. In one of the voice-overs, Markosian says, “I’m trying to understand you, Mom.” “You need to love me,” the real Svetlana replies. “You don’t have to understand. I don’t need understanding.”

When I got home from Stockholm I pulled out the videos I’d recorded in 1992, my own chronicle of that world: interviews with my students, walks through the streets (everything in some stage of demolition, it seemed), standing in line for morozhenoe, ice cream. A weekend trip to Irina’s dacha in the countryside, where I drank a delicious Egyptian flower water and was sick for a week. A trip to Sergiyev Posad to see the Orthodox churches. (“You must not call it Zagorsk,” our guide said, referencing the town’s Soviet-era name. “Never again Zagorsk.”) Dinner with Vladimir and his wife, Olga, and their son, Paul. Vladimir was a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute. We corresponded for several months after I left. Here’s an excerpt, dated December 12, 1992:

Now the economic situation in Russia is very hard. In this year the prices have grown more than 100 times and our salary have grown only 20 times. We see that in future will not be better than now and we think about the future work in the foreign countries in the field of my profession. Now Russia does not need the persons of my profession. Therefore I am obliged to change the field of the work, to do the commercial work, or to look for the work in my field of work in the foreign countries. 

Such hard-won democracy, overcoming czars and dictators to finally—finally—begin the long road toward a stable democracy. And now, just across the Baltic, a madman was attempting to turn back the clock: the day I saw the Markosian exhibit in Stockholm, Vladimir Putin launched an attack on the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, injuring twenty people, five of them children. 

***

Markosian auditioned sixty men for the role of Eli. Each actor was asked to draft a mock letter to Svetlana, attempting to convince her to come to Santa Barbara, as the real Eli had done. The actors then read their letters on camera. Some of these letters are displayed alongside photographs of the various actors, with clips of their audition reels playing on a loop.

I am an attractive man—not extremely handsome—but I think attractive enough to please you.

I am a good Christian. I love God and his rules.

Svetlana Dearest, Thank you for the lovely letters and the photos. You are always in my thoughts, and I can’t wait to see you in person. We have written each other for a long time now, and I feel that each letter draws us closer together. If you will take the last—and biggest—step to me, I promise you won’t regret it.

Watching the actors audition for the role of Eli—one more distillation of the distance between fantasy and reality—I thought about my own summer in Moscow. How we pretended to teach English when in fact we were trying to make converts; how we playacted poverty while our students and their families suffered. I thought of the distance between the glitzed-up, televised version of the American Dream Svetlana put her hopes in, versus her experiences in America, but also the way these intersected. After all, Markosian went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia. “It was a small little world and I changed that for you,” Svetlana says to Markosian in voice-over.

“Do you feel like our story is like a soap opera, Mom?” Markosian asks.

Svetlana is silent for a moment.

“It’s life,” she says, finally. 

 

Jamie Quatro is the author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You More. Grove Press will publish her novel Two-Step Devil in summer 2024 and her story collection Next Time I’ll Be Louder in 2025.

August 27–September 4: What the Review’s Staff Is Doing Next Week

Rare blue supermoon. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0.

August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school.

Summer Streets, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will beshut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. this Saturday in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola; oddly enough, there is even a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem immersive experience along the way. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA season, one of summer’s great sporting pleasures. “This is the last matchup of the year between the league’s two superteams,” Oriana tells us. “The Liberty just beat the Aces in the Commissioner’s Cup, but go to get another preview of what the Finals showdown will probably be.” (The playoffs begin September 13.)

The U.S. Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, August 28–September 10: Our managing editor, Kelley Deane McKinney, recommends going on opening day, when there will be matches happening on twenty-two courts. A day pass will get you access to twenty-one of them. She advises anyone attending to skip the main court, Arthur Ashe: “The stadium is too big for tennis and the good seats are all corporate boxes full of people who don’t know or care about the games and chat loudly the whole time,” she says. “Real heads know that Louis Armstrong is the better show court, only seating fourteen thousand.” A tip: sections one and two get the most shade during the day, but every seat has a great view! You can skip the signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce, which features tennis ball–shaped honeydew pieces floating in spiked raspberry lemonade “for, like, twenty-two dollars. This year I bet it’s twenty-five.”

Super blue moon, August 30: Our former intern and forever friend Owen Park alerted us to an important celestial happening. These days, it might seem that the moon is being overhyped: there are harvest moons, blood moons, supermoons, more moons than we can even count! But this one is actually really rare—a second full moon in the month of August, and the biggest and brightest of 2023. Misleadingly, the moon will not, itself, be blue; however, we now know the source of the cliché, and it will be one of your only chances to deploy it literally: once in a blue moon!

Sung Tieu’s Infra-Specter at Amant Galleries, through September 24: Remember Havana syndrome? The visual artist Sung Tieu takes the alleged sonic attacks targeting U.S. and Canadian diplomats as the subject of his recent artworks, now on display in Brooklyn. Another work explores U.S. military tactics in Vietnam—particularly the sound weapon titled “Ghost Tape No. 10.” This recommendation comes to us from contributor to and friend of the Review Krithika Varagur, who says, “I think her show will be both divinely trolly (she got MRI scans after trying to reconstruct the alleged sonic attacks) and ingenious (drawing connections based on archival research to the war in Vietnam.)”

J’ai Été Au Bal (I Went to the Dance) (1989) at IFC Center, September 1: Our intern Anna Rahkonen is going to IFC, to see a new 5K restoration of this film by the late documentarian Les Blank, codirected by Chris Strachwitz. I Went to the Dance documents the history of the music of Southwest Louisiana, featuring interviews and performances from prominent Cajun and zydeco performers.

Roundup: National Cinema Day, which means four-dollar movies at many theaters around the city, August 27; Kira Muratova doubleheader at Film at Lincoln Center (buy a ticket to one movie and get a ticket to the other free), through August 31; Winter Kills at Film Forum, starting August 25; Hester Street Fair, September 2 and 3; West Indian American Day Carnival, September 4; going to the beach any day, anytime, in celebration of the end of summer!

In This Essay I Will: On Distraction

From Elements, a portfolio by Roger Vieillard in issue no. 16 (Spring–Summer 1957).

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea.

In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down.

***

Bouvard and Pécuchet is at heart a simple novel, though its episodes could branch out, fractal-like, into infinity. There is a reason Flaubert never finished it, despite working on it for at least eight years before dying of a stroke at the age of fifty-eight. Originally titled “The Tale of Two Nobodies” (literally “The Two Woodlice”), its protagonists are two copy clerks, who, in the middle of nineteenth-century Paris, meet on a bench on a boulevard. Superficially, they are complementary opposites: one short, one tall; one ascetic, the other sensual. In a deeper sense, they are the same: office workers who perform questionably meaningful tasks while trying to cling to a bare sense of individuality. They strike up a friendship—they are amateurs, dilettantes, believers in progress. They are, in Flaubert’s imagination, men of their time. As they grow bored with their jobs of rote reproduction, they set out to fill their leisure with the pursuit of knowledge:

They learned about discoveries, read prospectuses, and their newfound curiosity caused their intelligence to bloom. On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous.

(I am relying here on Mark Polizzotti’s translation.) After Bouvard receives an inheritance from a recently deceased uncle, the two men hatch a plan to remove themselves from the city’s bustle and the drudgery of their work. They will use the money to buy a modest estate and live a life of freedom as country squires: “No more writing! No more bosses! Not even rent to pay! For they would own a house of their own! And they would eat chickens from their own farmyard, vegetables from their garden—and would dine with their clogs still on!”

Liberated from the office, they now can do whatever they wish. Why not tend their own garden, as Voltaire’s Candide once exhorted? Well, curious minds that they are, they want to learn the best way to make the garden grow. So they turn to books, and become case studies in the dangers of overestimating one’s own intelligence. If they are gardening, they think, why not turn to agriculture, too, and make better use of their land? Their plants die. Why do the plants die? Because, Bouvard and Pécuchet conclude, they didn’t sufficiently understand the hard sciences—and so their study of chemistry begins. Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

Commentators have remarked on the static structure of the novel: the reader must be willing to hear the same joke told repeatedly in different variations—a joke that punishes its pitiful protagonists over and over. Each time, this odd couple believes that they are close to a breakthrough, or at least to something like fluency, in their newly chosen field. But when difficulties emerge, failure follows quickly: “They gave up.” This futility is matched by, or even enhanced by, their optimism. Each time they surrender, they find something else to become engrossed in. Is this perseverance, or life as a great chain of distractions? And have they tricked themselves into thinking it matters?

***

What is distraction? Maybe it is just the need to be diverted: from the direction you originally set out on, from what it was you thought you wanted to do. After all, to desire something requires projecting yourself into the future—how do you know you’ll still want it when you get there? And along the way there are so many attractions, way stations, spots of time. Even an annoyance can be a pleasure: a fly keeps buzzing around your head while you try to write the next sentence, a ringtone interrupts the movie, and—it’s you. Just this one time you’ve forgotten to turn your phone off. If only the world would stop bothering you, you could finally get down to work.

Bouvard and Pécuchet, you may think, aren’t exactly distracted. In fact, at times they seem nearly maniacal in their thirst for knowledge. But isn’t the idea that] they are potentially interested in everything a kind of curse, something worse than indifference? As fast as they find a passion, they can be drawn away from it. They are avatars of the societal affliction Flaubert called la bêtise—mankind’s universal stupidity. Their curiosity has no staying power—it’s just the dirty runoff of a Zeitgeist that tells them to improve themselves, improve the human race. Their distraction implies a lack of concentration, the mark of a bad student. And they are tragic because they want so much to be good, to get the right answer. All the worse that they’re not reflective enough to see that all the spinning of their wheels will never lead anywhere. (But how could anyone think that and keep going?)

Now that I no longer work a forty-hour-a-week job, I tell many people I am writing a book. It is going along, I say, but slowly. How is it that so many chores, parties, trips, assignments, and plainly wasted hours intervene? Not everyone is distracted from their most cherished goals. But I think everyone is distracted from something—it is desire’s shadow, trailing behind our self-presentations. By beginning anything, we create the possibility of detours.

***

Today, it’s a commonplace to call the internet the ultimate distraction. While putting off writing this piece, itself already a distraction, I maintained a powerful ability to introduce obstacles to its completion. Recently, during another attempt to write, I snapped to my senses hours later, as if smash-cut through time, and realized I had been watching skateboarding videos on YouTube. I have never skateboarded in my life—I am not certain I have ever even attempted to put two feet on a board. I binged a Thrasher series called My War, about skaters who have struggled with a particularly difficult trick and persevered. I watch a skater known as Jaws ollie a massive twenty-five-step staircase in Lyon, tear his MCL, and come back, months later, to essentially jump off the side of a building repeatedly until he lands the trick. There’s no way this can be good for your body, but I find myself strangely compelled by the almost religious dedication. In their pursuit to hurl themselves down large flights of stairs, the skaters are committed.

I close the browser. There is an entire genre of commentary based around the idea that computers or the internet are having a deleterious effect on our attention spans, even on our reading comprehension. We are never present, the platforms having gamed out our interests better than we can ourselves. We contemplate putting our phones in automatically locking pouches before we sit down to dinner. I’m not sure it’s so simple—everywhere, a lot of work seems to be getting done, and every day we seem to be faced with more text to read than ever. I return to my document. I take some disparate phrases from my notebook and start to arrange them into the lines of a poem. Even doing something ostensibly virtuous, I am still attempting escape. I start looking at one of the pdfs I have open in Preview: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

All that we should do is just do something as it comes. Do something! Whatever it is, we should do it, even if it is not-doing something. We should live in this moment. So when we sit we concentrate on our breathing, and we become a swinging door, and we do something we should do, something we must do. This is Zen practice. In this practice there is no confusion. If you establish this kind of life you have no confusion whatsoever. 

Ah, turning to Zen—a bit of a cliché, I think, but still. Haven’t I been doing something, even sitting in front of this machine? I’ve at least been the swinging door, letting the rest of existence pass through me.

***

Flaubert did an immense amount of research for Bouvard and Pécuchet. While writing the novel, Flaubert read around fifteen hundred books in all the subjects that his Nobodies attempt and abandon. Perhaps Flaubert, in some sense, became one of la betîse himself, because he would never become a master of agronomy, anatomy, or pedagogy—only a master of the pen, an “homme-plume,” as he called himself in his letters. And the more he reads, the further he gets from completing his universal book.

Even the protagonists, having learned something despite themselves, can’t help but become melancholy, like Flaubert. In their defeat they become strangely sensitive, easily disturbed:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village … they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

In order to write an essay on a new topic, often one has to sail a little in the dark. I am not a Flaubert expert. I can write this essay only as an amateur: the breadth of scholarship on one of the giants of the novel is too daunting for me to do it otherwise—I would have to give up before I began.

Research easily becomes its own distraction. Fiction writers are not unfamiliar with this crisis, having placed their character under a tree, then specifying what kind of tree it is, then wondering if that tree would be in flower at this particular time of year, whether it grows in the particular geographical region where the story takes place. We can become masters of rationalizing the inessential.

There’s a kind of comfort in toying with a large body of knowledge, the way in which you can avoid writing a paper by entering a rabbit hole on Wikipedia—beginning on the front page and finding yourself reading about Byzantine dynasties, or non-Newtonian fluids, or Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century. Maybe this activity, even if it never gets us anywhere, is something closer to play. And without it, at least from time to time, we become dull.

***

Despite all the hand-wringing about distraction, it’s asked less often what it is that what we want to attend to in the first place (or, if answered, numbingly conventional—we want to “be more productive”). Today, being distracted usually has a negative connotation, because it most often means “not working,” whether you’re watching the World Cup from a browser window stashed behind your spreadsheet or you’ve decided to go to the bar on a Tuesday night instead of staying in and writing your three hundred words or polishing your presentation or organizing your sock drawer. A common idea of distraction presupposes that you’re turning away from something more important that you ought to be paying attention to instead. And you ought to be working all the time.

In order to succeed in a hypercapitalist society, we must focus. And to focus usually means to specialize: acquiring a skill, becoming a special version of ourselves—a person with a “bit” that distinguishes us from the cross section of people who otherwise share our Google AdSense data metrics. It can be hard work to become this particular, outward-facing self. The idea returns to me to the old chestnut of Marx’s in The German Ideology, imagining a different way of life: 

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

We live in nothing close to this hypothetical society, and we may never. But if Marx’s hunter-fisherman-shepherd-critic (an animal lover!) can be really envisioned, it’s clear that he is not distracted. Whatever he does is what pleases him. He is always where he wants to be.

***

There is a curious kind of essay that exists now, that is half-literary, half-personal: My life with author X. A year of reading author Y. The hope is that the personal touch might refresh the dusty pages of the classics—or, more likely, that great literature can buttress a first-person narrative that doesn’t quite cohere into a finished story, not yet quite heroic enough. An earlier version of this essay had more of me in it.

During Bouvard and Pécuchet’s brief turn as authors, they experiment with comedy and pick up Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 A Journey around My Room, a “travelogue” of sitting still (it was written while the author was under house arrest) that blows up mundane details to mock-heroic proportions. They are quickly discouraged: 

In this kind of book, it seemed, one must always interrupt the narrative to talk about one’s dog, one’s slippers, or one’s mistress. Such a lack of inhibition charmed them at first, then struck them as imbecilic—for the author erases his work by shining too much light on himself.

It feels good to erase myself, at least for a while. Still, something weed-like in me wants to make myself visible, to be a voice as attractive to you as Flaubert’s was to me.

***

Flaubert rose late, around ten, and took his time in the morning. At eleven, as one of his biographers, Frederick Brown, reports, he fortified himself for his task:

Unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The family then lounged on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them indoors, or climbed a steep path through woods behind their espaliered kitchen garden to a glade dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury that once stood there. Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside orchard, they would argue, joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down the river. Another site of open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century pavilion. After dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel.

In June 1852, Flaubert told Louise Colet that he worked from 1 P.M. to 1 A.M. A year later, when he assumed partial responsibility for Liline’s education and gave her an hour or more of his time each day, he may not have put pen to paper at his large round writing table until two o’clock or later.

Among the many things he is famous for, Flaubert is known as a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman refining the rhythm of each sentence until it possessed the cold polish of a gem. He complained frequently of his slow progress in his letters—the legend is that he wrote at a pace of about five words per hour.

But can all the time spent at the desk truly be accounted for? Is it possible that, despite his protestations, Flaubert was simply … goofing off sometimes? I will leave that question for the experts, but I know I have been prone to say the work was going very slowly when, in reality, I was doing something else.

And wasn’t that time that Flaubert spent before he set down to work, the time of a cup of cold chocolate and then the orchard, watching the sailboats pass by, a very good time after all?

***

Commentators have speculated that Flaubert considered appending to his novel a document he had written some years before, the so-called Dictionary of Received Ideas, a compendium of the banalities and clichés of his time—the nineteenth-century French equivalents of telling people that New York City rent is too damn high or that our country is more polarized than ever. The brilliance of the entries, which are alphabetically arranged, is in their teetering on the brink of being taken seriously:

ILLUSIONS: Claim to have many. Lament having lost them.

IMAGES: Poetry always contains too many of them.

IMAGINATION: Always vivid. Guard against it. When one has none, denigrate it in others. To write novels, all you need is a little imagination.

Flaubert never finished Bouvard and Pécuchet, but he left notes about how it might end: After a climactic confrontation with their village neighbors, who have put up with their eccentricities for long enough, the two Nobodies finally feel defeated. Exhausted and penniless again, they decide to return to their first love: copying. They “smile when they think of it.” The Dictionary, the fruit of their renewed scrawling, would both demonstrate their “learning” and release them, blissfully, from thought.

According to Flaubert, the use of the dictionary was not just to collect people’s stupidities—instead, it was to make one afraid to speak at all, since whenever you open your mouth, you may immediately find yourself saying something that isn’t your own. It takes immense effort and concentration to become new. Still, one wonders what Flaubert would have done for material if everyone had simply shut up.

***

I’m staring out my window at my desk—surely a timeworn part of the writing process. It is late summer now. A female cardinal, its colors muted but beautiful, has gone away after spending the day as my main attraction. I’m wrapping this up, getting ready to go to dinner. Wondering how this got started, how and why I wrote several thousand words about something I still know rather little about, really. And thinking about everything else that could have been in it (Thoreau, the class where I first read Flaubert, every terrible thing I saw and felt because I came of age “online”) that I left out. I think about how much more I enjoy starting things than finishing them. I’ve always wanted to feel full of potential, more even than needing that potential to be realized, maybe. As you get a bit older, disappointment arrives to fill that space. But it gives things their contours, too—if you’re committed, you chip away against that newly evident limit. Hoping to go a little further next time.

***

In 1875, Flaubert, stymied by his research for and the slow pace of Bouvard and Pécuchet, began a side project. He wrote the stories that would later be collected in the volume known as Three Tales. The first and the most famous is called “A Simple Heart.” It is both connected to and completely unlike his encyclopedic monument to human stupidity. The tale focuses on the sad, slow life of a woman named Félicité, the housemaid of a well-to-do widow in a Norman town much like the one Flaubert grew up in. Félicité has few distractions to speak of, because her life has virtually no pleasure. For a modest sum, she “did all the cooking and the housework, she saw to the darning, the washing and the ironing, she could bridle a horse, keep the chickens well fed and churn the butter.” She toils thanklessly for her mistress for years, appearing, to the bourgeoisie that frequent the house, to be indistinguishable from the furniture. For Félicité, anything that disrupts this backbreaking monotony is something to be savored in memory: the man who tried to court her when she was a young woman, a dangerous encounter with an angry bull in a pasture, even the death of her beloved nephew, a sailor, on the other side of the globe. These detours from daily routine are, in fact, the signature moments of her life.

When Félicité receives a parrot from a neighbor, a gift that reminds of her of her nephew and the New World to which he might have sailed, it is a balm from beyond: something to care for that is not merely a matter of survival, something harboring a mystery, however small. After its death, the parrot is stuffed and becomes a kind of object of religious adoration for Félicité. She imagines that she sees it, her last vision, at the moment of her death.

For a man who spent his time cursing the world for its idiocy, this is a moment of remarkable imaginative sympathy, and of love. The fugitive moments in between our lifelong undertakings, whatever their ultimate worth, may be what we are searching for all along. Maybe we are distracted because we are still learning how to live. 

 

David Schurman Wallace is a contributing editor of The Paris Review.

Searching for Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise at Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One premiere. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 2.0.

When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.” 

“It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie,” the greatest living actor continued. “Oppenheimer’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.” 

But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre and before that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—will basically always be the Chinese Theatre. I first encountered it in the film critic Nick Browne’s classic 1989 essay “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as an Ideological Form,” which examines the Orientalism of early film aesthetics, and the twenties trend of exotically decked-out American movie palaces that culminated, in 1928, “in the construction of Sid Grauman’s still famous (indeed iconic) Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, described as deriving ‘its inspiration from the Chinese period of Chippendale.’ It opened in May with the premiere of De Mille’s King of Kings with an evening of high ceremonies hosted by D. W. Griffith.”

My husband and I arrived early, and the urgency surrounding our evening of high ceremonies was immediately palpable. King of Kings is a biopic about Jesus, and, in many ways, so is every Mission: Impossible film. In my mind, Tom Cruise is something of a Chinese Jesus. Consider not only his massive appeal in China but also: his relentless hustle, his flexibility (literal and metaphorical), his ability to make lots of money … And while I realize that many of us have since moved on to (and likely even past) Barbenheimer discourse, let us not forget that it is Cruise who is almost single-handedly saving cinema in his commitment to the packed audience. (But Chinese Jesus has been overshadowed by the movie about white dolls and that other movie about the atomic bomb that intentionally avoids thinking about Japan.) 

Living in Los Angeles, I had joked with our friends who would be meeting us at the theater that it wasn’t entirely implausible that Tom Cruise himself would make a surprise appearance at our screening, as he is wont to do. But Mr. Cruise Mapother IV was apparently predisposed that evening, attending the film’s New York premiere. At least, that’s what the newspapers want us to think. 

No matter! Even if Tom Cruise’s body was east of Angel City that night, I sensed that his spirit was somewhere close by. Walking from the parking lot to the historic theater located at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard, I was confronted with a booth promoting the practice of Dianetics. No civilians were engaged at the table—which was decked out with a tablecloth in an alarming shade of red that flashed both as siren and warning—but the night was still young. Ahead of us sauntered someone in a Spiderman costume, while moving past us was a group of Japanese tourists toting large cameras, walking in what I could describe only as the wrong direction.

An enormous banner of Cruise and a motorbike falling through space was draped in front of the iconic theater. Because I had recently reread Browne’s essay, I was prepared for the overwhelming Orientalist design of the building’s exterior, which resembles a giant red pagoda. I was, however, not prepared for the women’s bathroom, which features an opulent anteroom covered with yellow wallpaper dotted with butterflies. 

Entering the theater, we were gifted with exclusive posters featuring Cruise, in profile and midgait, running across a red backdrop. “It almost looks like a Hitchcock poster,” a man noted, before adding: “specifically like Vertigo.” Also available were pins embossed with the letters IMF (short for the Impossible Missions Force, not to be confused with the International Monetary Fund—a joke that the film would later riff on).

Inside, there was even more swag to be found. For a mere fifteen dollars, one could buy a special Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One popcorn tin with free refills. My husband went to retrieve this impossibly good deal at concessions while I loitered in the lobby, inspecting the glass case displaying Dorothy’s blue gingham dress from The Wizard of Oz. Someone nearby noted that “the dinosaurs do not look good,” regarding their visit to the La Brea Tar Pits—which, out of context, is sort of the kind of poetic utterance Tom Cruise himself might make.

By the time we finally took our seats, the theater was almost entirely packed. The group of boys behind me kept debating whether “Tom might show up.” “Maybe he’ll come down from the ceiling!” one of them cooed, referencing the shadowy outline of Cruise’s floating body suspended by a wire (Ethan Hunt’s favorite method of entering a building) projected against the theater curtains. There was a nontrivial French-speaking contingent at this screening, some of them seated in front of us, though all I gleaned with my rudimentary French was “C’est parfait—parfait!” A girl wearing a sparkling headband and what appeared to be a wedding dress walked down the aisle. 

Finally, a woman introduced the film, emphasizing in particular the IMAX laser projection technology by repeating the word laser what felt like at least a dozen times. 

The guy describing Cruise’s series as Hitchcockian was right, of course, insofar as almost all spy thrillers today are indebted to the Master of Suspense. But unlike prior Mission: Impossible installments, Dead Reckoning—which takes place on a train for a significant portion of its extensive runtime—owes less to Vertigo than to Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, and one of my favorite early Hitchcock romps, The Lady Vanishes. According to one of the film’s exquisitely edited promos, which I also rewatched multiple times in preparation, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie actually constructed the entire train from scratch. “We had to build the train,” McQuarrie says to the viewer, “if we wanted to destroy it.” That kind of onetime high-stakes, high-production action sequence is key to why we love Tom Cruise—to why he’s credited with keeping the movies alive not just materially (at the box office) but also spiritually (by eschewing special effects and using real materials). He is the Akira Kurosawa of our time.

And as with every Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning bakes Tom Cruise’s life-sustaining efforts into the very premise of the movie. The plot, so gloriously convoluted that the film spends its first thirty minutes explaining it as though addressing a baby, can be boiled down to something like this: Ethan Hunt is tasked with saving a series of beautiful women, which is a metaphor for saving the entire human race, which is of course, an allegory for Tom Cruise’s endless mission to save the movies. This all gets compressed into the extended scene on the train—that old symbol for cinema, modernity, and sex with beautiful women all rolled into one. In one of my favorite moments, Ethan attempts to parachute onto the plane, but ends up making his entrance by crashing through a window, simultaneously taking out a villain while doing so. The train, as promised, is destroyed. But Ethan survives. 

The film itself flew by—all 163 minutes. We laughed, we clapped. We were a packed audience. During the few silent seconds when Ethan rides off a cliff on his motorcycle, someone in the room yelled, “CGI!” 

When it was over, most of the audience filtered out during the credit sequence. “Epic!” someone shouted nearby. While another called out to his friend, “Ethan.” I stayed behind for the credit sequence, along with a few lingering others, some of us wondering if there’d be a teaser for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. 

Given that the Mission: Impossible films are based on an older TV series from the sixties, the entire franchise has always carried melancholic valances. But these have grown more notable in the last few installments, all directed by McQuarrie. Ethan’s stamina seems to be wilting even as his spirit stays strong. In Dead Reckoning, a woman who had saved his life in a prior McQuarrie film dies under his watch. Maybe Ethan can’t save everyone. But I suspect that he’ll at least kill himself trying. 

Without giving too much away, the literal cliff-hanger at the close of Dead Reckoning—the first time the series has split its films—had strong end-of-an-era overtones. “There isn’t much time,” intones a concluding voice-over to Ethan. “The world doesn’t know it, but they’re counting on you.” You get the sense that he’s speaking not only to Ethan Hunt but also to Tom Cruise. Given the mournful narrative decrescendo of the last few Mission: Impossible installments, I’ll be surprised if there are any more to come after next summer’s much anticipated Part Two. 

For now though, I’m clinging—like Tom Cruise to the edge of a cliff in Mission: Impossible 2, or Ethan Hunt to the edge of a falling train in Dead Reckoning—to a franchise that isn’t entirely quite over. 

Walking back to our car, we passed the Dianetics table—now attended by a few interested patrons—and saw the girl in the wedding dress again. Apparently Paul Thomas Anderson had also been there in the theater. I hadn’t seen him, though. What can I say—I was looking for Tom, and it was a packed audience.

 

Jane Hu is a critic living in Los Angeles.

On Friendship: Juliana Leite and Devon Geyelin Recommend

Friendship bracelets, Ra’ike, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.

Simone and Zaza eventually left home for their studies—literature for Zaza, philosophy for Simone—and they reported life’s many novelties, love stories, and discoveries in careful letters to each other. In one of her letters to Zaza, de Beauvoir wrote, “Every page is always bliss, happiness in bigger and bigger lettering. And I love you more than ever at this moment, dear past, dear present, my inseparable darling.” This was the last letter between the two. Zaza died prematurely of an illness, and de Beauvoir would always carry with her the gift of this precious love for a friend. Like a silent river flowing beneath the papers and theories that would influence all Western thinking, there Zaza was with Simone. Zaza and a friendship’s love.

—Juliana Leite, author of “My Good Friend”

On a recent drive home from Knoxville to Nashville, I started listening to Sadurn’s album from last year, Radiator. It was very exciting because I liked it a lot, and I listened to a lot of Sadurn over the next few months. The band’s main singer and songwriter, g, can make their voice take very casual steps up and down in pitch, like on the song “dirt may,” specifically the version on the EP Sadurn / Ther Split. The song contains a moment in which g sings the word hear with at least six syllables, which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard, and which is responsible for the many times I’ve listened to it on repeat. 

According to the EP’s bandcamp page, Sadurn / Ther Split was “recorded on a 50 year old tape machine in a basement in West Philadelphia, Winter Solstice of 2018.” Sadurn shares the EP with a producer and musician named Heather Jones, who sometimes records as Ther. I did not initially like Ther’s songs on the EP. But later on I tried again, and found two things: that two of these songs (“advil” and “april in paris”) have some of the sweetest lyrics I’ve heard, even if I don’t totally understand them—are they about siblings? childhood friends?—and also, though the songs are attributed only to Ther, g’s voice is in the background, taking those steps that mean so much to me. The unnamed almost-duet feels very personal, very friendly, and again strikingly beautiful, even though at first I found the whole thing grating, maybe unpleasant, and potentially terrible. The internet says their friend Jon Cox was also present on guitar for many of the songs, though I didn’t know to recognize him.

All this reminded me of my friend Gwen, who always reads my writing. Recently I sent her something longish, and she sent me a picture of it printed out, most likely from the printer-fax-copier at the office where I used to work and where she still does. Although she might not be formally credited in any final version of the long thing, if there is a final version, she will be very much present within it, the same way she is in many things I have written, as are Anya, Nicole, Oliver, Sophie, and others. I feel like my creative ambitions shifted about two years ago, when I figured out or decided that my greatest artistic joy would most likely always be emailing my writing to people I like a lot, receiving their writing in return, and later talking about our drafts, or at least communicating via Google Docs comments. I like to think that all the people whose art I love are really just messing around with their friends, and sometimes a product emerges later, really like a postmortem on “one time we hung out and did this together,” and likely by now we’re all doing other things. 

—Devon Geyelin

What the Review’s Staff Is Doing This Week: August 21–27

Flushing Meadows Fairgrounds. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 4.0.

Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) 

U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 138 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.”

What That Quilt Knows About Me at the American Folk Art Museum, through October 29: This exhibition, recommended by our intern Anna Rahkonen, showcases forty quilts, some dating back to the nineteenth century. The quilts were made by a wide-ranging group of artists and craftspeople, among them a pair of enslaved sisters from antebellum Kentucky and an unnamed British soldier during the Crimean War. 

Kazuo Hara retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, August 16–31: At Anthology, a run of the intimate, activist documentaries of the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara—including portraits of life with cerebral palsy (Goodbye CP, 1972); victims of asbestos exposure (Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 2016) and mercury poisoning (Minamata Mandala, 2020); and an increasingly unhinged Pacific War veteran seeking answers about the mysterious deaths in his regiment (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, 1987). Most exciting to our associate editor Amanda Gersten: the by all accounts brutally voyeuristic Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974). After Hara’s ex-wife leaves him for a relationship with a woman, he follows her to Okinawa for a year, where she opens a nursery for the children of sex workers, joins a women’s commune, begins seeing an American GI, gives birth to her second child on camera, and enumerates Hara’s many flaws for his then girlfriend (who is also the film’s producer).

AFUEGO! Party at Deluxx Fluxx, August 26: The East Village nightclub Deluxx Fluxx hosts a monthly party that our former intern Alejandra Quintana Arocho never misses. “They have an incredible sound system, arguably the best in the city,” Alejandra says. “You can sway to the rhythms of reggaeton, R&B, dancehall, Afrobeats, and the occasional bachata.”

Ecuagenera NYC Pop-up at Brooklyn Horticulture, August 26–27: RARE PLANTS! There will be a tropical plant extravaganza at this Gowanus plant shop next Saturday and Sunday, hosted in conjunction with the plant conservator and producer Ecuagenera, which focuses on orchid species and hybrids. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, is going, in an attempt to finally finish decorating her apartment. 

Roundup: Pixies and Modest Mouse with Cat Power on the roof at Pier 17, August 21 (Amanda Gersten); Afropunk Festival at Greenpoint Terminal Market, August 26-27 (Cami Jacobson, engagement editor); The Italian Job at Metrograph, August 24 (Sophie Haigney); series curated by the filmmaker John Wilson at Anthology Film Archives, August 19–29 (Amanda Gersten).

The Lawn Is Resting: A Visit to Balzac’s House

The Maison de Balzac. Photograph by Bailey Trela.

The Maison de Balzac is located in the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, in the heart of the former village of Passy. If you visit, chances are you’ll approach it along the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and perfectly shaded, and boasts, according to Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t remember seeing when I visited in April. What I do remember seeing was an unaccompanied Alsatian with some sort of harness girding its chest, loping through a small nearby park. When I looked around, vaguely nonplussed, I noticed a clinique vétérinaire directly across the street.

If I’d had to explain to myself why, with only three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute need to visit the home where Honoré de Balzac, a writer I wasn’t even that familiar with, had composed the bulk of The Human Comedy, a fictional project I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m not sure what I would have said. Probably it just seemed that if anyone would have had an interesting house, it would have been him. Open one of his novels at random, and chances are you’ll find a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, today, can seem hard to place. Take Monsieur Grandet’s living room, for instance, as it appears in the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We learn the room has two windows that “gave on to the street,” that its floor is wooden, that “grey, wooden panelling with antique moulding lined the walls from top to bottom,” that its ceiling is dominated by exposed beams. “An old copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show its thickness, reflected a thin stream of light along an old-fashioned pier-mirror of damascened steel.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t begin to differentiate an old-fashioned model from a sleeker, more modern one. In a sense, this feeling of being lost was part of the appeal of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it. 

Which is another way of saying that when I contemplated a sort of generic Balzacian space, a vision of plushness, of pure and overwhelming material profusion would unfurl in my mind: a little room fitted out with dark wood and damask curtains, gilt mirrors and stubbornly bombé furniture, its walnut shelves and limestone mantelpieces offering stable quarters to a full range of dandy’s trinkets, like engraved pistols and silver-handled riding whips and even, glowing palely in the manufactured dusk like a sturdy snowball, a fine Sèvres sugar bowl—every detail, down to the motes of light-struck dust spinning in the sepia-toned air, tuned precisely to some ideal of costive, costly languor. You know, luxus, as the Romans must have done it. Who wouldn’t want to disappear into this?

So, here I was. There was a false start: a pleasant little gate with a plastic-sheathed slip of paper taped to it declaring that the gate was no longer the entrance to the Maison de Balzac. Through the gate I could see a set of steps leading down to the grounds of the museum, which occupies a sort of plateau between the rue Raynouard above and the rue Berton below, but I was directed instead down the road some thirty yards, to a squat, flat-roofed, glass-walled hutch. When I entered, the young woman manning the information desk swiftly rerouted me to a side door, which deposited me at the top of a set of open-air stairs that, it turns out, are completely accessible from the street. Dizzily, I descended.

The ground floor of the visitor center is occupied by the Rose Bakery, a modern assemblage of plate glass and black steel that seems, topologically, to bend everything into its orbit, like a black hole of bad taste. Spacewise, the Maison de Balzac seemed unbalanced, as though every effort had been made to keep my eyes directed away from the actual home where Balzac had lived. A half-kempt garden occupies most of the grounds, while the home itself is tucked away in a corner. Looked at directly, the house is strikingly modest—a low, almost defensive-looking structure, huddled on the hillside like a barnacle. I went in.

Inside visitors are confronted, not with the building blocks of a home—trinkets, chairs, rugs—but with depictions of the man himself: twenty or so visions of Balzac, the bulk of them markedly ugly. Here, for instance, is a caricature by the lithographer Benjamin Roubaud, in which Balzac looks like a swollen, somehow arrogant thumb. If your taste veers more modern, admire Balzac, Monumental Head by Auguste Rodin, a slabby, gleaming bust that seems to be actively melting before your eyes and that fully delivers on the promise of its title: it is a head, and it is monumental. And for a very particular audience, here’s a sculpture of Balzac as a surprisingly svelte seal, leaning back coquettishly as though just surfaced from the seas of some sexually confusing fever dream. (Apparently the statuette was made by Hanz Lerche to capitalize on the negative reaction to Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, whose harshest critics noted the work’s Pinnipedian affinities.)

Seven aggressively productive years of Balzac’s life were spent here. In 1840, harried by creditors in Paris and looking to disappear, he fled to the western suburb of Passy, going so far as to rent the property under the name of his housekeeper, Louise Breugniot. Naturally, a sense of guardedness animates the home. In his biography of Balzac, Graham Robb describes it as “a cunning little house,” partly hidden between an upper road and a lower road, while the writer Gérard de Nerval, Balzac’s close friend, referred to it as “an upside-down house.” It was here that Balzac went about his customary routines, composing his novels in the early morning hours and taking breaks to write passionate, lengthy letters to his mistress Eveline Hańska, the Polish noblewoman he later married, or gorge on stone fruits and pomes. Balzac was, by all accounts, extremely partial to pears, and their delicate, rounded scent pervaded the home in Passy.

These and other traces of life had all but disappeared. The only room maintained in the style of the time is Balzac’s writing room, a sort of humble cube containing a small personal library, a painting, and the writing desk on which he composed almost all of The Human Comedy, cranking out up to twenty pages a day—this before the advent of prescription amphetamines. The wall text describes the room as a “modest study” and, in what seems like an unnecessarily cruel appositive phrase, “a small room in a banal apartment in a village on the outskirts of Paris.” The floors were creaky, the famous red writing chair blanched by the sun, but there was something in the air—maybe it was just dust. Then again, maybe it was the poignant fact that a man who insisted on richly imagining the spaces his characters inhabited, sometimes to a plot-slackening fault, had done it all from a space that was, comparatively speaking, barren. 

Scattered about the ground floor of the house are a few other curios, including a bronze cast of Balzac’s pen hand, looking somehow pudgier in isolation; the porcelain cafetière that supplied his reputed fifty daily cups of coffee (Balzac drank his coffee black and unfiltered and described its effect in combustive terms, even going so far as to compare, in a short tract he wrote on modern stimulants, the black grains of ground coffee to gunpowder); and his cane, its handle wrapped in gold and studded with turquoise florets. The cane, which you almost certainly didn’t know about, made such a splash on the Parisian scene that it inspired Delphine de Girardin to write a novella, Balzac’s Cane (La Canne de M. de Balzac), in which Balzac lends his magical, invisibility-granting aide à la marche to a young man in trouble. (I have not read this book.)

I did another walk-through of the house, not wanting to miss anything, though it seemed I hadn’t. Outside, the sun was still out. I sat down on a bench outside of the Rose Bakery in front of a long wooden table and took out my Balzac—an old mass-market paperback edition of Old Goriot with one calamitous crack in the spine, which I’d been careful to tend to throughout the trip. I read half a page and didn’t feel anything in particular, which seemed like a shame. (Later, when I finished the book, I’d think to connect Rastignac’s final position, perched at the highest point of Père Lachaise and gazing down at the “humming hive” of Paris, with the Maison de Balzac’s own lofty station, overlooking various buildings, including the Turkish embassy.) To my right, an older woman with frosty blond hair and a black fur stole sat down with a paper thimble of espresso and began to smoke a cigarette so thin it seemed like a scratch on the air. Which at least was very French of her. 

In addition to its garden, the Maison de Balzac boasts a large lawn of natural grass, unevenly tufted. No one seemed to be taking advantage of it, and eventually I noticed a series of pale green signs posted here and there at foot level, on each of which was written, in a looping white script, “Pelouse au repos.” I googled it, and learned that the lawn was resting. There was a pigeon, unaware of this generous Gallic policy, exercising the lawn. It moved about and settled by a sign. It’d make a good picture, I thought, though by the time I’d gotten my phone out, he’d flown away. 

 

Bailey Trela is a contributing writer for the Cleveland Review of Books. His criticism has appeared in Commonweal, The Baffler, Frieze, and elsewhere.

Alex Katz’s Collaborations with Poets

John Ashbery and Alex Katz, Fragment, 1969. Photograph by Paul Takeuchi, courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.

The painter Alex Katz is best known for his portraits—colorful, flat, rich, and realistic, in a style that has become immediately recognizable as his own. Katz has always been fascinated by poetry, and especially by the work that came out of the New York School in the fifties and sixties. “What Katz found so compelling about this scene was its complete disregard for aesthetic precedent, irreverence for an academy of poetry, and gravitation toward vernacular expression, where words were less pondered and possessed an immediacy that spoke of nowness,” writes the art historian Debra Bricker Balken in the forthcoming book Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets. These qualities have something in common with Katz’s own work, which might help to explain why he has been so drawn to collaborations with poets—among them illustrations, prints, and covers for books by Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Katz has also painted portraits of a number of poets, including his personal favorite, Frank O’Hara, who was himself interested in the crossover between painting and poetry, and occasionally jealous of painters themselves. (“I am not a painter, I am a poet,” one O’Hara poem begins. “Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”) Below are several of Katz’s literary collaborations, including a cover he made for this very magazine in 1985.

Alex Katz and Kenneth Koch, Interlocking Lives, 1970. Photograph courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.

 

Alex Katz and Alice Notley, Phoebe Light, 1973. Photograph courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.

 

Oink! no. 18, 1984. Photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.

 

Issue no. 96 of The Paris Review. Photograph courtesy of Alex Katz Studio and GRAY, Chicago/New York.

 

Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets is forthcoming from GRAY in September.

The Animal of a Life

Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0.

Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We hadn’t been back to the artists’ colony together since. Standing on the lawn, looking up at the great mansion, we were a bit like bears on the wrong side of the zoo. When we were residents, we were free to roam the grounds, walking so close our coats swished together as we circled the four small lakes that dot the rich people’s estate. You don’t even notice there are visitors, welcome only on some woodland trails and in the rose gardens, laid out like those at a French palace. 

Whatever memories were stirred as we retraced our steps weren’t sharp. It was like rewatching a movie with different actors in the parts. Even if we’d entered the buildings now and the rooms where we’d talked, I doubt it would have made much difference. The movie I watch is in my head, and I run it more or less all the time.

This is the movie. I arrive at Yaddo lost. I’m absolutely lost in my life, and I turn sixty at the colony, and there’s something about a man there I find easy to be with. The first time we talk, we’re in a little parlor outside the room where meals are served, and I don’t know how Foucault comes up. It will turn out Foucault is always on Richard’s mind the way this conversation in the little parlor is always, more or less, on my mind. I say, “I find Foucault overdetermined.” Or maybe I say, without qualification, “Foucault is overdetermined,” and even though Richard loves Foucault and doesn’t for one moment believe this is true, he bursts into a smile because he’s never heard anyone say this before, because he’s not sure what I mean by it, and because he’s astonished by the chutzpah of such a blunt summation. 

Laurie, age 25.

Honestly, looking back, I have no idea why I said that. My guess is I was showing off. I also did think Foucault was saying that people are organized, without knowing they are being organized, to think and feel in certain ways, by forces with money and power. We are plugged into a matrix, or we’re chess pieces moved around a board, or we are sleeping beauties, who will die without ever having been awake. Richard says this isn’t what Foucault is saying at all. It’s some bullshit version of Foucault I’ve concocted in order to assert a Laurie-made, Nietzchean, life-force energy that’s bigger, in an animal sense, than the forces of capital and governments.

Anyway, when we were in the little parlor and he smiled rather than argued, when he said, “That’s interesting” in that fake polite and also genuine polite English way he has, when he said that, he was humoring me in order to see what I’d do next. And I had no idea he was humoring me because I am always too into my own thoughts to notice what’s going on around me. Thus love was sparked, as it always is, from a matchbox of mistaken understandings, plus the look and smell of the other person. 

Richard, then.

On the birthday visit to Yaddo, Richard was seventy-three. At twenty-three, when he was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, he was told he’d be lucky to reach sixty. Tactful, they are, in the National Health Service. After I got together with him, I met a doctor who was also a writer at another artist’s colony. He said, “Get out, now.” He meant the probable strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, blindness, and amputated limbs that were inevitable. I didn’t get out (obviously).

Richard has been in a long-term study of type-1 diabetes and has turned out to be what’s called “a unicorn,” in that he still has all the body parts, in good repair, he had when we met. The key is controlling high and low blood sugars, and to do this, he wears an inserted pump that supplies insulin, and also an inserted sensor that reads his blood-sugar levels every five minutes and sends the information to the pump on a Bluetooth signal. There’s no cure for type-1 diabetes. You adjust to its limits, the way you adjust to the limits of having a span of life. 

On the sloping lawn at Yaddo, two women were taking pictures of the mansion with cameras on tall tripods. They were unsure about where they were. They knew the place had something to do with art—all life has something to do with art, if you tilt the camera. Their husbands were nearby, at the famous racetrack, and the women were happy to be divided from the interests of the people they were spending their lives with. 

Richard, now.

Richard looked neither happy nor sad. He’d had no burning wish to see Yaddo again, even though it was the place where we’d met and even though it was where, once again, he’d opened a door, as if going out to buy bread and milk, and had kept walking. “All the times I did that, I only felt trapped in retrospect,” he said. “I needed to get out in order to see what had made me leave a life I was in. I’m a strange person.” I thought, not so strange. I said, “Do you think you feel trapped in our relationship?” He said, “I’d only know that if I left.” We were having a good time.

After we left Yaddo, we walked long the main street of Saratoga Springs, looking for a place to write. I found the bakery I remembered was good, but it was noisy and crowded there. I bought an apple tart, and we drove to a grand hotel I’d been to, situated in a state park. We sat outside on white rockers, looking at garden beds that were going out of their minds from all the recent rain. 

The other night, I was looking at reactions to a piece I’d published, and I couldn’t tell if I was satisfied or even what satisfaction would feel like. I said to Richard, “I’m very ambitious, nothing there has dimmed.” He said, “What a shocker. It’s not as if I don’t know you.” I wondered if there could still be surprises for him. It was just a thought. He likes to say, joking and not joking, “You have no idea who I am.” Who am I to argue with a person who plays his cards so close to his chest?

We wrote on the rockers and afterward read our pieces to each other, as we always do. Richard wrote, “I don’t know what seventeen years feels like or any other amount of time. Memories are each in their own separate space, and all memories that are bright have the same brightness, and they all feel the same distance away. It takes a separate thought to place them in some sort of order.” Yes, I thought, that’s right, and it was a new thought, and I loved the way I’d received it in Richard’s writing.

At every age, you think about the age you are in the animal of a life, and at every age you think about your place on the track you are circling with other people your age. Richard and I have arrived at the hindquarters, probably, approaching the tail. At every age, you are also the face—looking out, listening, feeling things, tasting and sniffing around. In this way, you are all the ages you have ever been and will ever be. In the car on the way to Yaddo, I said, “When you’re young, you dread getting old because you have to look like shit, but when you are old, it doesn’t feel like an especially different time in terms of what you know or understand. I think, though, something has become easier.”

Some kind of happiness has settled over me. It’s not about knowing I will die. I was born knowing I would die. It says so on my birth certificate. It’s that I’ve become better at things I’ve practiced my whole life. I was saying this recently to a friend at lunch. I said, “When I look back, I can see more clearly the ways I’ve been an asshole to other people. There’s less defense.” She said, “How were you an asshole?” I said, “It’s hard for me to see what other people need and give it to them.” She said, “Are you less of an asshole now?” I said, “No. I’m a better writer. The writing forces you to know things that are true.”

Laurie, age 76.

When Richard and I met at Yaddo, for a long time I didn’t know if he was happy to see me when we crossed paths or if he was just being polite, the way he is to everyone. I didn’t know until one morning he came to find me in the room where we checked our email and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I still don’t know half the rooms inside him. At the beginning, he made me wait, and it made all the difference. 

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and she writes theEverything Is Personal Substack.

Sharon Olds and Rachel B. Glaser on Reality TV

Texas Lane, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The random casts of participants are a fun study of group dynamics. These shows allow me to witness tender, precarious moments between lovers and strangers. They prove that the mundane and dramatic often go hand in hand. Watching them, I’ve cried, laughed, and shouted at the screen. I’ve become more aware of how we are all living a life of scenes, surrounded by and involved in a seemingly never-ending narrative.

Recently, my husband and I watched Single’s Inferno, a reality show in which young men and women glamp on a desert island. If they “match” with each other, or win challenges (like mud wrestling), they get to helicopter away to a fancy hotel for an overnight date. The stragglers cook together and end up bonding. These conversations encouraged me to write scenes in a less plot-centric way. Often in fiction, it can feel like there is no room to just “hang out.”

Change Days, meanwhile, is a show about couples at an impasse trying to decide whether they should stay together or break up. When the participants go on dates with new people, the viewer knows their backstories and partners, which gives added layers of context and raises the stakes. Watching the couples argue felt more relatable and expansive than watching shows whose participants have left their lives behind and are presented as clean slates ready for new futures. Getting this private peek into the complicated, painful, confounding, beautiful, terrible tangle of long-term relationships felt thrilling and sometimes overwhelming.

Scrolling around on KOCOWA (Korean-language Netflix, basically), I discovered His Man, a show in which eight single gay men live with one another and date one another. His Man felt groundbreaking to me. It showed me personalities and a kind of camaraderie that I’d never seen on TV before. One man sometimes did makeup for the others. There was a date on which both men wore flowers behind their ears. The show had a bizarre, funny rule: every night, the men were summoned one by one to a phone booth on the roof to call one of the others on his cell phone for a minute, without revealing his own name. Sometimes, a man would call his roommate on the show, and have to sheepishly return and face him after the call. Some men would receive many calls every night. Others never received any. By the end of the show, they’d all become great friends, even though some hearts were broken along the way.

—Rachel B. Glaser, author of “ Dead Woman ”

The other night, I spent ten minutes watching Jeopardy! Masters during an ad break on American Idol and was thrilled to see Ada Limón’s beautiful face and strong, sparkling, welcoming spirit as she asked the Poetry questions. (And I answered all but one right!) Thinking of her poems, and of the other poems that were read around the NYU M.F.A. program workshop table years ago, reminded me again that the arts invigorate and encourage us!

This is why I like both singing and sports shows—for the occasional great note or jump that moves us to tears. I don’t think of such shows as lowbrow but as popular, unintimidating, and emotional, helping us find our feelings—to weep for love and loss is a gift art gives us, don’t you think? The kindness and wisdom radiating from Keith Urban’s voice on the American Idol finale helps me live, just as the beauty, grace, and power of Anthony Davis’s moves on the court during the NBA playoffs fill me with joy and awe.

Art helps us live! Megan Danielle, Wé Ani, Colin Stough, Oliver Steele—their singing voices calm and thrill and inspire me. Lucy Love’s voice and power, her expressiveness and wild courage and originality, show me imagination and the hard work of hope. Zachariah Smith, with his throaty grit, his teeth showing, his visible, audible longing and passion, shows us the peace-warrior work of art, which can save lives. And most of all, Iam Tongi: the shocking sweetness of his throat’s beauty helps me feel as if I’d had parents who were able to love their children as Iam Tongi’s parents love him and give him means of joy and generosity. When I hear Tongi sing, I feel safe in the arms of protective love. 

As a child, I drew cards for people to give thanks for gifts. So this is my thank you to these artists. At Willard Junior High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, I wept with joy at the rock-and-roll ballads that released our feelings and gave us hope that tragedy could be lived through, and emotional damage survived. At Berkeley High School, a pair of best friends—Joseph Davis Gilbert (1940–1964) and Edward Brown (whom I hope is still alive and singing!)—lifted the spirits of the student body with a rendition of “The Fox”: “the fox went out on a chilly night.” Joe ’n‘ Eddie soared our spirits over into joy—never a note sharp or flat—as Solomon Wheat made a touchdown in the Tournament of Champions at the Cal stadium itself! Surely art exists to make life less unbearable, yes? Singers and athletes, the gifted, like gods for the rest of us, charged our souls with joy—as if we could be, at moments, worthy of at least part of the beauty of the earth.

Another memory arises: when I was fourteen, my mother was finally taking the brave action of divorcing my father, and she was suffering from anorexia nervosa. Her older sister, who loved her and could afford a gift for her, sent my mother and her three kids to Hawaii for a month. My older sister and I took surfing lessons, and got to know the teenage teachers a little. We would go for walks on the beach after supper. This is where I met the first young man I kissed and was kissed by. Some circle of good fortune seemed to close when I watched this latest season of American Idol, shot in Hawaii, and Iam Tongi was named the new American Idol for 2023.

 —Sharon Olds, interviewed in issue no. 244